Sean Patrick McCarthy (Shon Keane) | The Prom Queen / 2000

shower curtain meets closet

by Douglas Messerli

 

Sean Patrick McCarthy (Shon Keane) (screenwriter and director) The Prom Queen / 2000 [18 minutes]

 

Shon Keane’s The Prom Queen is frankly a movie that’s hard to love, despite the fact that the two central figures Corey (Todd A. Corvo), a punk rocker high school student who is apparently cis male but daily dresses as a transvestite who hangs out with the school nerd, Michael (Ben Provo). Both are the school losers and are bullied, particularly Corey, which is why we feel anything for them.

   But the situation even at the turn of the Millenium is totally unbelievable, since Corey plans to go to the prom with Michael, and as they go to rent a tux for Michael, Corey, sensing an attraction from one of his bullies, Peter (Jacob Garrett White), ditches his regular and takes Peter out to the “rock” for a good suck and fuck session, which Petey apparently quite likes.

    If you still believe in the logic of this short film, you will naturally predict that although it appears that Peter is a closeted gay boy who finds Corey to be “beautiful,” he is, in reality, dating the school bitch, Sara (Emma Welch), who might remind you of somewhat of Tracy Flick in the 1999 movie Election except that she lacks Tracy’s dogged intelligence. Peter and Sara obviously will be this year’s king and queen of the Prom.

    Corey ultimately does attend the school prom with the bland, red-shirted Michael, Corey accessorizing in a plastic shower curtain as both dress and a robe, arriving to the prom in regal style, whereupon he attempts to out Peter to his girlfriend and his bully gang in front of the entire senior class in a literal brawl between, as one of the general descriptions of the film put it, “shower curtain and closet.”

     Inevitably, the punk boy is taken out and beaten, befriended at film’s end only by his nerdy “boyfriend.”

     All of the events are fairly predictable, and nothing in the film—except perhaps for Corey’s whimsical costumes and hair coloring—are even slightly of interest. Corey and Michael are maybe just the most unlikeable of lost gay boys you might even encounter, in some ways as obnoxious and unappealing as the heterosexual bully boys. At least Peter is cute in an odd short of manner, and one wishes that the film had more closely followed him to explore just how much he was forced to suffer in having to date the bitchy Sara just to keep the dread secret of his attraction to the punk homo trash world Corey represents.

     Usually in such outrageous teen fantasies at least the gay boys have the opportunity to save the day, right the situation, or resolve their own high school tortures; but by the close of The Prom Queen Corey and Michael sit side by side with Corey in tears, even his temporary infatuation with the prom king having proven to be pointless. And in the end we have to wonder what was all the fuss about.

     Collected in a DVD anthology with several far more charming and ambitious films of the period in Boxer Shorts, it is hard to see today what attracted the several audiences of the gay festivals in which it was lauded (it won an award at the Hamptons International Film Festival). Clearly the sheer ludicrousness and tenacity of its hero inured it to some viewers. I just found it to be shrill, but then I’ve never liked a single movie that was about a high school senior prom. I purposely attended mine with a female who was the school photographer, a large camera strapped about her neck the whole time. I brought her an orchid, but when I think back I wonder if she could have even worn it with that contraption bouncing on her breast. And a couple of years earlier the school prom king, also the captain of the football team, was secretly a gay boy I would have died to have gone to the prom with, but in 1961 no one could even imagine such a possibility. And fortunately, I lived; while he took a gun to his head a few years later.

 

Los Angeles, January 19, 2026

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (January 2026).